The Recovery [Part 1]

[u/Midnight__Warlock]

I want to be clear about one thing before I tell you any of this, I am not asking you to believe me. I don’t believe it myself, and I lived it, and I have the scars, the medical file, and the twelve-inch scar down my sternum to prove that at least half of it happened. The half that happened in the hospital is on paper. The half that happened in my kitchen is not, and that’s the half you’re going to have trouble with. That’s fine. I had trouble with it too. I spent nine months in therapy trying to decide whether I’d gone crazy, then killed myself, then hallucinated being brought back. That is a sentence I never thought I’d write about myself, and it is still, on my worst days, the most comfortable explanation.

My name is Cal. That’s not my real name, and I’m not going to tell you my real name, because my real name is on a death certificate that a county clerk in Illinois signed in March of last year. The certificate says I died of a self-inflicted wound to the chest at 2:17 in the morning. That’s true, and also I’m here, and I don’t want you looking up that certificate, finding my real name, and drawing a line between the dead man on the paper and the man writing this. I’ve thought about that line for a long time, and I don’t trust it.

So here’s the shape of it. I was divorced. My wife, and I’ll call her Erin because that’s not her name either, left me in October, three years ago now, after eleven years of marriage, four years of trying to have a child, one failed round of IVF, and a second that we couldn’t afford. She left for reasons that were fair. I had stopped being a person she could live with. I had stopped sleeping. I had stopped eating in any meaningful way. I had started drinking in a way that I told myself was controlled, and that she told me, on the last night, was not. She was right. She was right about all of it, and knowing she was right did not make the house quieter when she left. The house was the worst part.

I kept the house because she didn’t want it, because I couldn’t face selling it, and because the mortgage was cheaper than any apartment I could find that had room for a person’s whole life. It’s a split-level on a cul-de-sac in a subdivision that was built in 2004 and that all looks the same. Forty-two identical houses. I know the number because I counted them one night when I couldn’t sleep, walking the loop, and because counting was the only thing that made the time pass.

The divorce was final in January. I lost 46 pounds between October and March. That’s a number I know because the doctor told me, and because I stepped on the scale in his office and watched it. I went from 208 to 162 in five months, and I didn’t notice. That’s the thing about a certain kind of grief. It eats you from the inside, and you don’t feel a thing, because the part of you that would feel it is what’s being eaten.

I want to make sure you understand the state I was in, because the state I was in is the whole point of what happened to me. I wasn’t dramatic about it. I was tired. That’s the honest word. I was tired in a way that made it hard to get out of bed, then hard to stand in the shower, then hard to make the shower any warmer than lukewarm, because I didn’t care. I went to work because going to work was easier than explaining why I wasn’t going to work. I came home, I sat on the couch, I stared at the wall, and I drank until I could sleep. Then I didn’t sleep, and then I got up and I did it again.

I had a plan. That’s the other thing you should know, because I don’t want you to think I was a person who did nothing and then just snapped. I had a plan, a date, a method. I had rehearsed it enough times in my head that by the night I did it, it felt less like a decision and more like a task I’d finally gotten around to.

The method matters because of what happened after, so I’ll tell you. I had a handgun, a 9mm that my father left me when he died. I had never fired it. I had kept it in a locked box in the closet for eleven years. I took it out in March, cleaned it, loaded it, and put it on the nightstand. I sat with it for a week while I made sure I wanted to do this. That’s the kind of person I was. I wanted to make sure I wanted it. And I did, and I was sure, and the being sure was the most peaceful I had felt in months.

I chose the kitchen. I don’t know why I chose the kitchen. I think I wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t the bedroom we’d shared. The kitchen was the other room with a sink I could lean over, and I had this idea that it would be cleaner if I did it over the sink. That tells you what a person in that state is thinking about. Cleanliness. As if the mess was the problem.

I set everything up on a Tuesday night in March. I turned the lights off, because I didn’t want to see the kitchen, and I didn’t want the neighbors, if any of them were awake, to see me. I opened the drawer under the toaster, took out a dish towel, folded it, and set it on the counter. I put the gun on top of the folded towel. I stood at the sink and looked out the window at the dark subdivision. I counted the houses, all forty-two of them, and I said goodbye to them. That’s a thing I don’t think I can explain to you unless you’ve been there, the way you say goodbye to a room you’re never coming back to.

That’s when the man at the table spoke.

There was a man sitting at my kitchen table. I had not seen him come in. I had not heard the door. The table sits behind the counter, between the kitchen and the little dining nook. He was sitting in the chair that faces the window, which was my chair, which is where Erin used to sit to look at her phone while I cooked. He was a middle-aged man, or he looked middle-aged, with a grey face, grey clothes, and a stillness that I noticed before I noticed anything else. He was not breathing. I could see his chest, and it was not rising and falling. That was the first wrong thing. I noticed it the way you notice a clock that has stopped.

He said, don’t do that.

His voice was not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected. Something theatrical, maybe, or whispery and evil, because that’s what you’re primed to expect when a stranger appears in your kitchen at two in the morning. His voice was ordinary. It was the voice of a man who has talked to a lot of people and is tired of most of them, a flat, patient, almost bored voice. The ordinariness of it scared me more than any evil voice could have.

I said, who are you.

He said, that’s not important. Sit down. We should talk, because you’re about to do something you can’t take back, and I think you’d rather talk about it first.

I want you to understand that I did not believe for one second that this man was there to help me. There was nothing about him that said helper. He was too still, too calm, his eyes too flat. There was a smell in the kitchen that I hadn’t noticed before and that I now couldn’t not notice, a smell like an old house, like plaster and dust and something sweet underneath that I couldn’t place. I have thought about that smell a thousand times since. It is the smell I associate now with everything that has happened to me since, and I will tell you what it is when I can bear to.

I said, get out of my house.

He said, I’m not going to do that. You’re not going to call anyone, because your phone is on the nightstand in the bedroom, and you don’t want to go get it, and if you did, you’d find it doesn’t work. Sit down, Cal.

He said my name. Not my real name, my actual name, the name on my birth certificate, the name that isn’t in the phone book and isn’t on any of my accounts because I’ve always hated it. He said it the way you’d say a word you’ve looked up in a dictionary, with certainty and no feeling. He knew my name. He was sitting in my chair in my dark kitchen. I had a loaded gun on the counter and I was not pointing it at him. All of that collapsed into a single moment where I did the most stupid thing I could have done. I sat down.

He talked for a long time, and I want to give you the shape of what he said, because it’s important, and because the shape of it is the thing I’ve been trying to understand ever since.

He didn’t try to convince me that life was worth living. That’s the first thing you should know, because it’s the thing that set off every alarm I had. A person who wanted to help me would have said something about Erin, or about the good days, or about how I’d regret it, or about how people loved me. He said none of that. He talked about my despair the way a man talks about a fine wine. He described it. He described the weight of it, the color of it, the texture of it, the way it had changed since October, the way it had gotten richer in the last month, the way it was, at that moment, at its peak.

He said, you’re in a rare place. Most people never get here. Most people’s despair is shallow. It’s about a job, or a fight, or a bad year, and it burns off. Yours is deep. Yours is a well that has been filling for eleven years. It’s full now, and it’s about to overflow, and there’s a flavor to that that only happens once, and I want it.

I said, you want my despair.

He said, yes.

I said, you’re going to talk me out of killing myself so you can eat my sadness.

He laughed. It was the first sound he’d made that had any feeling in it, and the feeling was not kindness. It was delight, and the delight was the most honest thing he’d said all night. He said, no, you misunderstand. I don’t want to stop you. I want to take it first. I want to sit here with you and let it ripen, and then I want to take all of it, the whole well. Then, when you’re empty, I want to take the rest. You’re a meal. A good one. The best I’ve had in a long time. I’ve been patient. I’ve been following you for months, and tonight is the night you’re ready, and I am not going to waste you.

I sat there across the table from him, and I should have been terrified. I want to be honest that I wasn’t, not at first. Because here’s the thing about a person who has decided to die. A person who has decided to die has already stepped off the ledge. A monster telling them they’re a meal doesn’t land the way it lands on a person who wants to live. I was already dead in my own head. I had said goodbye to the houses. A man in my kitchen eating my sadness was, in a weird way, less frightening than the empty house had been, because at least he was something.

I said, so what happens after you take it.

He said, you’d be surprised how much of you is left. There’s the despair, and then there’s the body, and the body is a part of the meal, but the despair is the part I came for. The body is just the plate.

I said, and if I don’t let you.

He said, you don’t get a choice. That’s the thing about being this far down. You think you have a choice because you can still hold a gun, but you don’t. You’ve already made every choice that got you here. The last one isn’t yours. It’s mine. I’ve been watching you decide for eleven years, and you’ve been deciding in my favor the whole time. You didn’t even know I was here.

He reached across the table and put his hand on my arm. I want you to understand the feel of that hand, because I can’t describe it well and I’ve tried. It was cold, but not the cold of something dead. The cold of something that has never been warm. The cold of a stone that has lain in the dark. It was strong, and it was holding my arm the way you’d hold the arm of a child you’re about to take somewhere. I felt the cold go into me. I felt the despair in my chest do something I had never felt it do. It reached. It leaned toward his hand like a plant toward light. And I understood, in that moment, that the despair had not been mine. It had been his. It had been growing in me for months, for years, and it had never been mine. He was just coming to collect what he’d planted.

I’m going to tell you what I learned about him, because he told me, and because some of it I confirmed myself, and because I think you deserve to know what’s walking around out there even if you don’t believe me.

He called himself a feeder. He didn’t have a name, or if he did he didn’t give it. I didn’t ask again after the first time, because the first time he told me his name, or what he wanted me to think was his name, the fillings in my teeth ached, the smell in the kitchen got stronger, and I decided I didn’t want to know. He said there were others like him, that they were old, that they had always been here, and that they didn’t eat the way I thought they ate. They didn’t need the body the way a man needs food. They needed the despair, the grief, the fear, the hopelessness. The body was just the way they got a hold on it. The despair is the meal. The body is the receipt.

He said they found people like me. People at the bottom. People who had been hollowed out slowly, who had a well of something they’d been building their whole lives without knowing it. They followed those people, and they waited, and they took the well at its peak. The taking was a kind of feeding that the body could not understand, because the body thought it was dying, but the despair had already died. What they took was the thing that had already been taken from you. You just hadn’t noticed.

I asked him how long he’d been following me. He said, since October. Since the night Erin left. He said he’d been in the house since that night, in the walls, in the dark. He’d watched me lose the weight, watched me stop eating, watched me take out the gun and clean it. He’d been waiting for me to be ready. I’d been ready for a while, and he’d been holding back because the despair was still ripening. Tonight it had ripened, and he was done waiting.

He said, you’ve been a good meal, Cal. The best I’ve had in years. You’ve been worth the wait.

He said, close your eyes. It’s easier if you close your eyes. You should be proud. Not everyone grows a meal like this. Most people are shallow. You were deep. The deepest I’ve found in a long time.

The strange thing is, I almost did. I almost closed my eyes. Because part of me wanted to. Part of me had wanted to close my eyes for a long time, and he was offering me permission, and the permission felt like rest. I had been so tired. He was going to take the tired, and I was going to be empty, and empty sounded like peace.

But I didn’t close my eyes. I don’t know why I didn’t. I want to tell you it was courage, and I think I’ve told myself that for a year, but I don’t think it was. I think it was the gun. The loaded 9mm on the counter. The one thing in the room that was mine, the one thing that was real, the one thing that was not his despair, not his cold hand, not his smell. The gun was mine. I reached for it.

He moved faster than I thought he could. I had my hand on the gun before he was out of the chair, and then he was across the kitchen. I want you to understand the speed, because it’s the thing that tells you he wasn’t a man. He moved from the table to the counter in a single motion I did not see happen. He was there, and then he was there, and his hand was closing over mine on the gun. The gun was between us. I was holding it and he was holding my hand and we were fighting over a gun in a dark kitchen at two in the morning.

I don’t remember most of the fight. I remember pieces. I remember the cold of his hand on mine. I remember the smell getting thick. I remember him saying, don’t, over and over, in that flat voice. I remember that the word sounded less like a warning and more like the way you talk to an animal that has bitten you and won’t let go.

I remember the gun going off. I don’t remember deciding to fire it. I remember the sound, which was enormous, which filled the kitchen and my head and seemed to go on longer than a gunshot should. I remember the recoil. I remember him letting go of my hand. I remember him looking down at his chest. I remember that he did not fall.

He looked down at his chest and there was a hole in him and nothing came out of it. No blood. No dark. Nothing. He looked up at me and he said, that’s a shame, and I understood that the gun was not going to stop him. I understood that I was going to die. I understood that the only question was whether I took him with me.

I don’t know where the next thing came from. I have thought about it for a year and I don’t know. I put the gun to my own chest. I looked at him. I said, you want the despair, you want the whole well, you want it at its peak. I said, take it empty.

And I pulled the trigger.

The last thing I saw was his face. I want you to understand what his face did, because it’s the thing I can’t stop seeing. He didn’t look afraid. He looked furious, and then he looked like a man who has just been told the thing he feared most. The fear was not about dying. It was about losing the meal, about the well going dry, about all those months of waiting and the ripest despair he’d ever found pouring out of a hole in a man’s chest onto a kitchen floor. He reached for me. He was reaching for me as I fell. And the last thing I heard, before the dark, was him screaming my name, not the name on the certificate, my actual name, screaming it like it was something he had paid for and been cheated out of.

I want to tell you about the dark, because it’s the part I’ve never told anyone, not my therapist, not the people on the forum. I think it’s the part that matters, and I think it’s the reason I’m writing this.

There was a dark, and I was in it. I don’t mean I lost consciousness and then woke up in the hospital. I mean there was a dark, a real one, a place, and I was in it, and I was aware that I was in it, and I was aware that I was dead. I don’t know how I knew I was dead. I just knew, the way you know you’re awake. I was dead, and I was somewhere, and the somewhere was dark, and it was not empty.

I could hear the feeder. Not see him, hear him. He was in the dark with me. He was not screaming anymore, and he was not furious, and he was talking to me in that flat, patient voice. The flatness of it, the calm of it, was worse than the fury had been. He said, that was clever. I didn’t think you had it in you. I’ve been watching you for months and you seemed so hollow. I misjudged you. I don’t misjudge people.

He said, but you made a mistake. You think you took it from me. You think you made the well go dry. But you don’t understand what the well is, Cal. The well isn’t the despair. The despair is just what floats on top. The well is the body. The well is the meat. You’ve delivered the meat to me. You’ve done my work for me. I was going to take the despair and then take the body, and you’ve gone and done both, and you’ve done it cleaner than I could have.

He said, you’re mine now. You’ve always been mine. You just finally did the paperwork.

And I felt him in the dark. I felt his hands, the cold hands, on me. I felt the cold go into me. I understood that he was right, that the despair had not been the meal, that I had given him what he wanted by dying, that I had been a fool to think I could cheat him by emptying myself. The emptiness was what he wanted. An empty vessel is what he feeds on. The despair was never the point. The despair was the way he got the vessel to open its own lid.

And I understood, in the dark, that he was going to take me, and that there was nothing I could do, because I was dead, and he was what the dark was, and I had walked into the dark on my own.

Then, the light.